Olli Kortekangas(born 1955) is one of
Finland’s busiest and most popular contemporary composers. After
studying composition at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy with Einojuhani
Rautavaara (and later with Dieter Schnebel in Berlin) he has written
a huge range of music for orchestra, choirs and solo voices as well
as chamber music and instrumental pieces including two fully
radiophonic works.

‘Daddy’s
Girl’ – Isän tyttö is the
latest of his six operas. We met in the afternoon preceding the
premiere of ‘Daddy’s Girl’ at Finnish National Opera in Helsinki.

We began by discussing why so many modern Finnish composers
are drawn to opera. Compared to the UK, the Finnish operatic output
is enormous and until very recently Finnish National Opera was
committed to producing at least one new Finnish opera every year.

OK: Well, opera has for decadesbeen very popular in Finland, partly of course because we
are still a young country without a long history of any opera at all
but partly also because we do have a very long tradition of singing.
Singing is a major theme in the Finnish national epic TheKalevala for example, in which disputes are sometimes settled
by singing contests. We also have a lot of choirs in Finland -
although only one fully professional one – the Finnish National
Opera Chorus – and the standard is generally very high. I myself
was a choral singer for many yearsandI also directed children’s choirs.

Though all of this is obviously true – the first acknowledged
Finnish opera isKung Karls jakt - The Hunt of
King Charles written to a Swedish libretto by Fredrik Pacius and
premiered only in 1852 and the first major opera in the Finnish
language Pohjalaisia – The Ostrobothnians by Leevi Madetojadates from as recently as 1924, I am still curious about the
fact that opera has fascinated Finnish composers so consistently
over the years. How do so many performances come about, I wonder
since new opera is so often an expensive luxury in the UK?

OK: One important additional factor is that every major
town in Finland has a professional orchestra.They have a
tradition of performing operas as a change from concert music and
sometimes even commission operas. Also, there are quite a few small,
experimental opera companies. So, we have a lot of outlets all of
the time.

I comment that it is a great pity that Finnish opera does not get
performed much elsewhere, apart from operas by Kaija Saariaho – who
is based in Paris and whose operas have libretti in French - and
wonder why this is, especially since Finnish is a particularly
beautiful language to listen to and is probably very rewarding to
sing.

OK:Well, some of Rautavaara’s and Sallinen’s operas have been been
successfully performed abroad, but I
agree. Finnish is a very good language for singers and after all,
Janacek’s operas get performed worldwide and not that many people
speak Czech. But it certainly took a few years before that started
to happen. Perhaps Finnish opera will begin to travel more in time.
I certainly hope so.

Having read that many young Finnish composers in the 1970s –
Kortekangas among them - felt that Finnish music was ‘small and
stale’ and that they wanted to ‘open the windows to Europe’ at the
time, I was reminded that a contemporary derisory comment referring
to earlier Finnish opera was to call it ‘Fur Hat Opera’ because of
its preoccupation with Finnish history. I asked if Olli
Kortekangas himself thought that Finland had changed much over the
past ten years or so, and particularly whether Finnish people were
as proud of their nationality as I had thought they were when I
first visited the country. (My own impression is that
Finland has changed, although differently from the UK and I had
noticed a newspaper article that morning for instance about the
restructuring of the University of Turku in which all departments
were to become part of three new faculties: science, pedagogy and
theology.) .

OK: I think people are still proud of being Finnish
and having Finnish traditions, but we have had our share of external
influences in recent years, not quite as massive as in other
countries perhaps, but still quite a few, including our own economic
collapse in the beginning of the 90s.

And although it is true that that you see the same shops, same
advertisements and same television programmes in many different
parts of the world these days, I like to think that it’s partly only
surface, and there’s a lot of the essential Finnishness left
underneath. But we cannot escape globalisation, and instead of
whining about it, we should do our share in making the world a bit
better. Daddy’s Girl, for instance, is about the contrast
between successive generations in one Finnish family spanning sixty
years and is an attempt to express what is really important about
human values, for nationality, politics and for changing ideologies.
In the end, these are universal issues.
Commentary like this is a very important reason for
making operas, especially if you can portray real people with real
emotions reacting to the kind of events which affect us all.
Describing the world through “the big emotions of the little human
being”, conveyed by the human voice – that’s opera at its best!

But what about the music? Olli Kortekangas’s own ideas about
music in general must have developed a lot over more than 30 years
as a composer, so did the music in ‘Daddy’s Girl’ also change to
reflect the episodes in the opera?

OK: It does change. In my music I am referring to different
musical styles and genres, but I’ve still wanted to make sure that
it sounds consequent all the time, that it’s my music from beginning
to end. Muchof it is built
on Leitmotiven. (He sings the motif for the main character Anna,
‘Daddy’s Girl’ herself.) I like to write music that is rewarding
for the singers involved, so that they can enjoy themselves on
stage. (Murmurs of deep approval and relief from me.) And
there is music for children in this opera, two soloists and a
children’s chorus. I enjoy writing music for children although it
can be surprisingly difficult. But there is also a big fugue-like
section and several choruses, and it is scored for a standard
orchestra with double brass and woodwind and a synthesiser. The
music is melodic although it is built on a fairly complex harmonic
structure.

I say that he must have mellowed quite a lot since his early days
and he laughs and says ‘Well,I’m still the same guy, just
a better composer.’ We part thanking each other for making time
for the meeting and I say that in UK theatres we think it is bad
luck to wish artists good luck on a first night, so I won’t.

As we leave the Opera House and walk into the Helsinki snow, I am
pleased to have met such a thoughtful, articulate and indeed kindly
man. I look forward to the evening performance, quietly confident
that I will not be disappointed. As it turns out, my confidence is
particularly well-founded (see review.)

Bill Kenny

Note: Both 'The Hunt of King Charles' and
'The Ostrobothnians' will be performed by Finnish National Opera in
2009. For more details, please see the
FNO's web site.